


our ruined house

by buckstiel



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Trans Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, post mag180
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:07:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26656369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: Jon and Martin wake in the mysterious apocalypse-sheltered manor, faced with an impossible choice.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 8
Kudos: 128





	our ruined house

**Author's Note:**

> title from "the last toast" by anna akhmatova. unbeta'd.
> 
> the power of this podcast is that i'd sort of given up on this sort of thing but then mag180 kicked me down ten flights of stairs so here i am again, clown shoes and all
> 
> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

As a child, Jon found it impossible to grasp how the two legs of a trip, the there and back, never matched in duration. The same path, in reverse, but they always slid through the return faster-- _a half hour on the bus across town is still a half hour coming home_ , his grandmother said more than once, eyes never lifting from her knitting even as the bus hurtled over Bath Road’s potholes. It shook Jon’s fleeting glimpses of the bay into a froth, and he’d grip the latest book shoved under his nose harder, redoubled the white spiderwebs of creases crossing the flimsy cover. The latest, the one he still remembers from that six-week period of therapy, is a thick volume on the science of _Star Trek_. He’d never seen an episode but the newest installment featured a wormhole, and he reread those chapters late into the night instead of journaling for his next appointment with the shrink. 

A defense mechanism, maybe. Imagining Bournemouth’s buses slipping in and out of wormholes was infinitely more appealing than trying to parse out his troubles socializing in school--or, god forbid, Mister Spider--to some greying stranger. He can’t even remember if the therapy was his grandmother’s idea or mandated by the school--but he remembers the bus rides, the occasional detour it would take when there was road work, and the journey would stretch an extra hour in the eleven-year-old mind of Jonathan Sims as he pictured the swirling tunnel of another rip in spacetime.

Later, of course, he chalked it up to what it really was: familiarity speeding things along. The act of discovery sends observation into overdrive, all the newness acting as tripping hazards, a mental speed bump. 

Jon remembers all this, the bus rides and wormholes and unwatched _Star Treks_ , upon waking from what feels like the longest sleep of his life. 

He wakes on top of a thin quilted comforter. A fancy bed fully made, ornamental pillows fluffed just so and in their proper positions above his head, which was thick with grogginess. 

The longest sleep of his life--he dreamt of university, the karaoke cafe Georgie’s friend from her Mandarin classes frequented. He’d been there only once, a couple weeks before everything between them fell apart, but the dream didn’t care about the unreliable narrator--the image was crisp, the music was loud, and the singing was awful in their tiny room. The spotlight fell on Jon, and there was a melting cone of rum raisin in his hand not gripping the microphone, and the lyrics of his selected song circled around emulsifiers and spaniels and Norse mythology.

It dragged on forever, fresh without the specters of toothed apples.

He spots Martin’s feet hanging off the end of the bed, realizes Martin’s arm is the source of the warm weight across his stomach. There’s snoring in his ear, sun creeping through the airy chiffon curtains draped over the windows. Birds chirp over the quiet and it’s not the deathly foreboding call of the skeletal ravens hovering over the domain of The Extinction. They’re regular birds. Larks, wrens, whatever. He doesn’t need to be a birdwatcher to know they’re not aiming for his gut.

Martin’s left foot, still in trainers grimy from the end of the world, twitches. Dreaming, likely. Jon rolls onto his side, shuffles himself until his back is flush with Martin’s chest, soft and warm, and the arm around him tightens. A sigh tickles the back of his neck, then a press of lips against the knot of his spine. 

It comes back slowly: the blind spot in the domain of The End, the manor, Annabelle and Salesa. He supposes he should worry, should check--just a peek--to see if Martin’s dream is a nightmare he could sever. 

He strains, he squints. Nothing floods through, not a blip nor the start of a hunch--just Martin, mumbling into his hair as the blank blue sky through the window sits static. 

Unseeing.

“Martin.”

“Hm…” He presses closer, every tense part of him from the last stretch of their journey languid and loose, exhausted. 

“Martin, wake up.”

“I know ‘m living in the Archives, but you don’t have to be my alarm clock…”

“ _Martin_.” 

“Oh!--” He crinkles his nose in an attempt to push his glasses up his nose--a futile attempt, and Jon’s heart trills against his ribs. “Right. Right, okay… good morning, then.”

Martin kisses like a revelation: his own, pushing his tongue against yours, finding new ways to braid his fingers into your hair, even in the angle of the shine gleaming off the dark oak of his eyes staring into yours. Even the little sounds he makes appear surprised, and soon Jon’s own hands are digging into Martin’s messy curls, and he can’t pull himself close enough. The rumble of Martin’s growling stomach vibrates through their thick layers of sweaters, clashes against his own. Vaguely he’s aware of the sweet scent of cinnamon toast and brewed earl grey drifting from the corner. 

“You’re hungry,” Jon says, pulling back from Martin with a slight drag of his teeth. 

The processing is visible across his face--the long way, traversing unfamiliar territory until it finally lands. “I--I suppose I am,” he says. He stares off at the bedroom’s far corner, where a thick wisp of cobweb curls listlessly against the draft. “Oh my god--how long have we been out? Annabelle was--and Mikaele Salesa, wasn’t he dead? And--Jon, we _slept_. And I’m _starving_.” 

Not five minutes after Jon brings the breakfast tray to the bed does half the toast disappear. Jon rarely paid attention to his human hunger pains when he had them, so it’s difficult to quantify what these specific angles in his belly mean, how he’s supposed to tell the way this burbling twist of his gut translates into a span of time. Another wormhole, maybe. It’s not so far-fetched at this point. 

Halfway through the ewer of tea, there’s a knock at the door. Mouths full of toast, they offer something garbled and impossible to parse, so the door opens anyway--Salesa stands before them, tall and wide, taking up nearly all of the available space that the doorway has to offer. Even under the deep bronze of his skin, his cheeks push a ruddy hue, all clashing against his pressed white suit. 

“Ah, you’re awake!” he says. “Do let us know if you’d like more. I can’t imagine how famished you must be after your journey. I trust the tea was up to your standards?”

Martin stiffens, but only slightly. “We’re great,” he says. “What is this place?”

“All in due time, after you’ve had time to recover--and clean yourselves up, if you wouldn’t mind. A human body is simply not meant to trek across the end-times like you lot have…” He turns on his heel, hand gesturing around some invisible orb hovering mid-air. 

Jon pushes another piece of toast into his mouth as Martin hops forward to slam the door closed. The latch clicks into place right as Jon senses his throat shifting the chewed toast past the shortened border of his ribs, into his stomach, and a pang is satisfied. The relief, like the span of his sleep, is unfamiliar. Almost instinctively he reaches to the ether for an explanation of how the human digestive system works and comes up blank. He reaches for how Salesa survived the explosion that supposedly killed him and comes up blank. 

He glances to Martin, looks him up and down and finds the love there pouring out of every part of him, but there’s nothing there that would require his other Eyes to see. 

“I’m not The Archivist here,” Jon murmurs. At the corner of his eye, Jon notes Martin raising an eyebrow, but he focuses down toward his leg, reaching for the bloody indents of Daisy’s teeth. The pain is sharper when he squeezes. What looked like a short order healing now openly struggles, weeping red against near-clean bandages. “I’m not The Archivist.” 

“What?”

“I’m just Jon.” He feels himself laugh. It’s not like the laugh among the tombs before they arrived here, tinged with the horror of their surroundings. Uncomplicated, light, it bubbles up and pulls his face into a grin. “That’s not been true since--lord, I don’t--”

Martin kisses him. Martin has a hand against his jaw and another shifting down his back, hot, and for the first time in recent memory, Jon finds himself wanting to crawl into his lap and reduce his vocabulary into vowels straining against his throat. So he does. He flings a leg over Martin’s leg, digging a knee into his hip hard enough that Martin pulls back, eyeing him with pupils blown wide enough to swallow him whole. 

“Let’s find out what this place is later,” Martin breathes against his neck, and it’s an easy proposal to agree to. 

The thing about an end of the world soaked in fear is that there’s no room for satiation--of fatigue or hunger or thirst or, or, or. Here, it all comes rushing back, the want for all of it, knowing that it’s not in vain. Jon nips at the soft skin behind Martin’s ear and almost jumps at the whine held tight in the chest against him, at how his own blood shocks hot at the sound. A rarity. A first time for everything, and it’s a delight to be surprised by anything anymore. 

So he holds Martin’s face in his hands, inches from his own, and grinds slowly down. He watches. He may not be The Archivist here, but he still wants to know--he wants to see Martin, helpless and flushed and overcome, finally, with something good. And if he has to be an archivist, surely he can catalog something better, all the wonderful faces Martin makes that he hasn’t had a chance to observe, the ones that can’t exist past the ethereal border of the manor’s estate. Martin trying his family-recipe baklava, Martin letting himself talk with abandon about his favorite old radio drama, Martin coaxing a spindly garden spider into his palm. The archive’s not complete without them and their thousand counterparts, and what’s an incomplete archive but a spotlight on things to be missed and grieved for?

Martin’s arms tighten against Jon’s back as he buries a yelp against the torn, soiled seam on Jon’s jumper. Catching his breath, he glances up through his pale eyelashes, a grin pulling against the fabric over Jon’s heart. “I feel like a teenager again.” His voice is muffled, fond. 

(Jon loves him. Tries to memorize the sound, the angle of his eyebrows, placing sticky-tabs here, and here, and here.)

“We have to change out of these clothes anyway,” he says. “They are… unsightly.”

“Fair enough.” Martin’s hand trails down to Jon’s hip, running a finger along to his stomach and lower before Jon gently returns it to the starting point. “You’re sure you’re fine?”

“I got everything I wanted, yes.” He presses a kiss to Martin’s head as he glances around the room--on top of a table near the door to the bathroom sit two sets of clean, meticulously-folded clothes. “We really should try to investigate this place.”

Martin’s sigh is a rush of warmth through his jumper, and the grip of his hands grows almost imperceptibly tighter--something possessive, or close to it. “You’re right. It’s…”

“It’s what?” 

“It’s difficult to--nevermind.” He has no trouble standing while Jon’s perched in his lap; he unwraps Jon’s legs and carefully sets him down on the dark polished hardwood. “We’ll get to the bottom of it when we’re not so ripe.”

*

Whatever passes for the sun here is cresting over high noon when they finally make their way to the manor’s extensive back patio overlooking the rolling hills of the garden. Halfway to the pond, Annabelle stretches herself over a lawn chair, a black sun hat pulled over her eyes so she can read the tattered paperback held overhead. At this distance, it’s impossible to tell the title, but the fuzzy blips of color sit familiar against Jon’s straining memory. 

At the decorative curves of the stone railing stands Mikaele Salesa, his white suit a near glaring neon. He surveys the garden like a proud father, and something about the satisfied curve of his lips sends Jon’s molars grinding. 

“Welcome back to the world of the living,” he says. He doesn’t spare them a glance as they sidle up beside him. “I don’t say that lightly. We’re the only ones who can say we’re doing anything close to that nowadays.”

Jon tries not to think of Basira, of the manor severing the link between them. She’s putting Daisy’s body to rest. Her limbs must burn with the effort, but it’s not living if half of you is dead. (Under the leg of his crisp new pair of jeans, his wound throbs and aches. It’s nothing. It’s nothing. The pain means that it’s one more thing he doesn’t have to leave behind, not yet.)

“How?” Martin says. 

“I didn’t sell Jurgen every little treasure I found, you know. Some books I wanted to keep for myself--the helpful ones, see. He was too curious about the dark. He never wanted to plan ahead. Well…” He gestures to the greenery, the light twittering of the birds. “Only one of us is here. How is ol’ Jurgen, anyway?”

“Hm.” Martin worries at a patch of stubble he missed shaving. 

“Well,” Jon says. “It’s sort of…” His hand grips around an invisible pipe and pantomimes smacking it against a just-as-invisible skull with a tongued _thwack_. 

“Ah. Well.” Salesa raises an eyebrow. “You?”

“Oh, uh,” Jon coughs. “No, actually.”

“Shame. About Jurgen’s fate, I mean. Not about you not being the one to bring it about.”

“Of course.” 

“I’m not surprised, though. Not at all.” He does a quarter turn on his heel toward the open door to a large hall, its back wall lined with windows that throw light all the way to the top of its cavernous ceiling. In the far corner is a baby grand piano, the one Jon fuzzily recalls just before their collapse upon arrival. “Bad things come to those who hoard for hoarding’s sake.”

He retreats. Moments later an airy piano melody drifts over their heads toward the lawn, and Annabelle’s head offers a momentary tilt away from her book back toward the manor. It’s short, an annoyance. An everyday hurdle that doesn’t require breaking a sweat to see your feet on the other side of it. 

Martin’s hand finds his, weaves their fingers together in a vice grip. “So that’s it, then?” he mutters. “A Leitner that can create a bubble for the end of the world?”

“Not a Leitner, technically,” Jon says, and Martin bumps their shoulders together. “But yes, I understand what you’re saying.”

“Good.” Martin’s grinning again, self-satisfied and playful, and Jon makes copious notes in trying to file it away for later. For a few moments, he stands breathing in the fresh country air, and suddenly he’s using the hand not wrapped around Jon’s to point toward the pond on the far side of Annabelle. “Let’s go swimming!” 

“What?”

In a rush, Martin leads them down the stairs and into the thick grassy expanse, dirt and dried blades pressing up between their toes, the pages of Annabelle’s book fluttering as they rush past, ignoring her complaints about how they sent her bookmark flying into the monochrome abyss under her chair. 

“It’s just a pond,” Martin says, stripping down to his boxers. “Not an end-times trap. We can just swim in it!” 

He disappears beneath the water in a splash, his dirty-blond curls flattening against his head when he emerges. The invigorated glee, that’s another to add to his archive, a glistening wet shimmer of youthful enthusiasm, just for him. Annabelle sits far off at Martin’s back still engrossed in her book, unavailable to click her phantom pincers at the corners of Martin’s mouth. He can dive in after him, unburdened, kiss him there himself until those corners tilt even further up Martin’s face, threatening to split it into something wonderful. 

When the sun--whatever it is--starts to dip behind the treeline at the far end of the estate, Jon tries not to linger on shadows, the hazy outline of a tall tower against the orange-lit clouds, the buzzing cicada chorus that shrieks in pain if you let your attention drift. At those moments, Jon tries not to focus on the faltering light in Martin’s eyes, the flickers of doubt, how after all those moments he grips at Jon tighter, kissing him silly against the bank of the pond or in the patch of wildflowers near the edge of the woods. Remarking on the thick aromas drifting down from the open windows of the manor--sauteed mushrooms, herb risotto, sizzling slabs of marinated duck held tight against the cast iron. Grease and excess. The promise of falling asleep on the pillow of a sated stomach, spooned warmly against your lover.

(Jon thinks of Basira and the stink of the burning bodies in the furnace. Of Daisy, burning, unrecognizable.)

Salesa holds a dinner for them all, and they share it in silence. 

Surely there is something to say--but also, maybe not. If he’s not The Archivist here, then maybe Annabelle is just Annabelle, without the marionette strings afforded by the will of The Web. And Salesa has already said his peace. There’s food and drink and nothing to stare deep into the recesses of their souls--what else is there to hope for in an end of the world wrought by The Beholding?

When they retire to their rooms, Jon lets himself sink into the hold of Martin’s arm on a loveseat facing the west-facing windows, a stupor fogging over his senses. It’s warm here, happy. This man sees him and loves him, all of him, and there’s no tugging, twitching fight over the balance there. He loves Martin, he sees Martin. He wants to live a life with Martin. For once he sees a future and it digs sharp fingernails into his throat. 

(Maybe, a maybe. It’s all a maybe--maybe they could make it work, maybe they could exchange the suffering they’ve logged for a future they could face without hesitation. A future that they’d embrace happily knowing the last days of their lives would be full of satisfied reminiscence instead of regret,)

The sun sets against the treeline in deep purples, and Jon can’t tell if he’s wrapped around Martin or if it’s the other way around. 

“Did you ever want children?” Jon asks.

“I could never decide,” Martin says. “ My genes have enough problems, and I just.... I was so scared to mess up, but I wanted to be able to do it right for once, you know? A Blackwood, not sowing the seeds for future therapy… Why do you ask?”

He asks why, but he knows. Jon doesn’t need the powers of The Eye to figure out that much. 

“I just wonder if it’d be possible here,” Jon says. “I haven’t had my T shots in months--or… however long it’s been.”

The silence stretches on. The moon rises. They retreat to bed, sleep, don’t talk about it further. Morning comes and they grasp at each other in desperation, Jon luring out that same lovely lilt of whining underneath him, and Martin is the first to untangle himself from the sheets. 

It’s not until after lunch Martin finds him again. In his back pocket is a worn copy of Anais Nin’s diary, and his hand is hesitant trying to find a grip on Jon’s, weaving their fingers back together as a blanket safety measure. 

“Do you want to stay?” Martin says, and it’s barely audible. This far down the garden, the insects’ buzzing rolls in waves, and their crescendo threatens to drown out his voice. Threatens, but it cuts through. Not unlike a knife, Jon thinks to himself, however dulled and wavering. 

When he meets Martin’s gaze, he can’t parse anything past the question mark held in his furrowed brow. 

“We could stay.” His other hand finds Jon’s, squeezing. “I bothered Salesa this morning until he gave me some straight answers. The book--we’re safe here, it opened up some kind of wormhole. This is a pocket of England from a world where the Entities don’t exist. They can’t find us, we--we could take a wing of the house and never even see him or Annabelle unless we wanted to…” 

And beneath it, unsaid: _we could live a life._

_You could be “just Jon” forever._

“A wormhole?”

“That’s far from the point.” 

“I know, I know…” He squints over Martin’s shoulder to where the sky meets the swaying treeline. The shadow of the Panopticon he was so sure loomed over the grounds at sunset failed to appear when the horizon started to bloom into lavender that morning, and there’s no sign of it now. “I… everyone else--”

Martin kisses him, and this time it’s closer to a car crash the way it lands, the way his fingers climb to the tangles at the back of his head, shaking and stuttering in a desperate attempt to hold firm to something. Anything. And Jon can be anything, the Institute’s already taught him that--researcher, Archivist, monster. What’s a fourth thing, after all, when it’s for Martin?

“I’m so tired, Jon,” he murmurs. “And it’s… it’s tempting, right?”

“Martin…”

“You said yourself you don’t know if this is reversible.” 

“So you don’t want to try anymore?”

“No, I--” His thumb brushes the arc of Jon’s eyebrow, doubling back to worry at the gap from one of the smaller worm scars. It shakes. Martin shakes, and Jon wraps his own hand as far around Martin’s wide wrist as he can manage. “Forget it.” 

By the time Jon’s consciously registered what’s happened, Martin is already shrunk by the distance, halfway back to the manor. Annabelle, lounging in her usual spot with a new, thicker novel, glances between them with an exaggerated swivel of her head. And it’s not that he trusts her advice, but she’s there and clearly curious, and there’s pretense shifting underneath it all, something about avatars and the stripping of power. 

Once he’s close enough for the book’s front cover art to shift from smudges to discernable figures, his eyes drift up to the side of her head--the spiderweb design sits beneath a shorn section of hair as a tattoo instead of threads pulled taut against her skin. 

“Unabridged _Les Mis_ ,” Annabelle sighs, tossing the book under the lawn chair. “Proper ironic.”

“I suppose.”

“Nice not knowing everything?”

“Nice not being able to bend people to your will?”

She grins. Even outside the reach of the Entities, her teeth sit too sharp for Jon’s liking. “It’s a bit boring, to be honest.”

“Is that why you called up Martin?”

It was never going to be that easy. Her grin shifts darker even under the blazing light of the afternoon. Here, she’s just a person, and still that grin sends his gut churning bright in fear. 

“Maybe I just wanted to catch up,” she says finally. “I mean, I was already here. We’re living in the apocalypse of _your_ god, Archivist. I can be forgiven for a little bit of curiosity.”

“Don’t call me that. Not here.”

“Oh…” She pouts, a mocking air dripping off every edge. “I forgot. You don’t like your power. You’re going to give it up and live like a real boy for the rest of your days.”

So she doesn’t need the power of her Entity to spin up those around her just how she wants--it’s fine, it’s fine, Jon can march up to the manor as she chuckles at his back and whether she intended this or not doesn’t matter in the wider scheme of the day, not when Martin’s disappeared through the back doors in a huff, holding something heavy under his tongue. 

He can see the closed door to their room from the bottom of the main staircase, more foreboding than it should be. On the other side of the manor, in the kitchen, Salesa’s heavy footsteps fall between the banging cabinet doors and clattering utensils in the sink--a specific image, not provided by the Beholder, but organically sprouted in his head. There’s a comforting imagination to it, not knowing exactly how his grip slips from the side of the mixing bowl. 

The same is not afforded to the blank slate upstairs, where the only certainty is Martin, and surely that is enough. It has to be. 

When he steps inside, Martin’s half bent over on the loveseat, hands cupped around his mouth. Eyes swollen and pink and sad in a way that Jon can’t undo just by taking his hands in his and kissing inside the bridge of his nose. 

“M--”

“I don’t want you to die.” 

Oh.

“I don’t want to watch you stand against Elias and die. I don’t like the odds.” He’s speaking faster now, words tripping over each other in the rush to fall off his tongue. “I’m in love-- _I’m in love with you_ and if there’s actually a way you don’t have to die in front of me, can you blame me for thinking about it?” 

Jon falls into the other half of the love seat, wraps his thin arms around Martin--hardly enough to offer any shield, but he can try. He can only try. He can catch any tears against his lips before they tip over the side of Martin’s eyelids. He can offer up his hands, the warm scarred skin as proof of life against the frenzied pulse in his neck. 

“I know we can’t leave everyone to rot,” he says. His thumb traces the burn lines along the back of Jon’s right hand. “But we shared real food here. You asked about _kids_.”

“I’m sorry--”

“No, no…” Martin brings their foreheads together. “I shouldn’t have--”

“I wish I _could_ give you that life,” Jon whispers. “It’s supremely unfair that it’s so unlikely.” 

Beyond the windows, the sky is bright blue and sightless. Jon cradles Martin’s head against his shoulder and meets the stare of that open blankness. He thinks down to the kitchen, where Salesa still clatters away with the pots and pans; he thinks of his family’s baklava, the hot aroma of honey and cloves hovering sticky between their fingers, the possibilities offered by a measurable amount of time.

“We can have one more day,” Jon murmurs into his hair. “We’ll get what we can of that life in one more day.”

(And if a bundle of clouds passes in front of the sun, offering a glimpse of a shadowed tower glaring relentlessly down toward their spot on the earth, Jon doesn’t pay it any mind. At least not for one more day.)


End file.
